Pat Kilkenney

Despite his travels, Pat Kilkenney always has remembered what it's like to be an Ohioan. That memory has proven valuable now that he's back home.

Mr. Kilkenney is vice president of programming acquisition and executive producer at SportsTime Ohio, the flagship station of the Cleveland Indians. He left Florida-based Sunshine Network to join STO, a startup network launched in 2006 and owned by the same Dolan family that owns the Indians.

Armed at the outset with only Indians programming, STO now features the Browns, Mid-American Conference, Ohio High School Athletic Association football and basketball championships, outdoors shows and well-known personalities Bruce Drennan and Chuck Galeti, each of whom has his own talk show.

STO president Jim Liberatore, who previously worked at Sunshine Network and knew Mr. Kilkenney through a former colleague there, pitched the STO opportunity as a family business, a grassroots regional sports network.

That appealed to Mr. Kilkenney, a Euclid native and graduate of St. Joseph's High School and Ashland College.

“The mantra was that this was going to be an Ohio network,” Mr. Kilkenney said.

Joining STO wasn't the first time Mr. Kilkenney had returned to the region after leaving. He started his career as an intern at WKYC-TV, Channel 3, in 1992, and a year later became a production assistant. In 1995, he moved to an NBC affiliate in Atlanta, then to Jacksonville, Fla., to work at a film company. He returned in 1999 to work at WKYC when the Browns came back, but in 2003 went to Sunshine Network in Orlando.

He said to move up the ladder in TV, being nimble is a way of life; that's something his wife, Youngstown native Kathleen, has accommodated.

“She's loved the changes of scenery,” he said.

Mr. Kilkenney and his wife have two children, Ryan, 9, and Bridget, 7, and live in Concord Township.